The problem imo is that it tries to be TOO clever. It tried to guess whether you want highlights savings, tries to guess about whether there are faces in the image etc. Frankly, I want matrix mode to average out the scene and give me an exposure straight down the middle, accounting for the brightest highlights and darkest shadows. I can exposure compensate from there.

Whatever clever logic it is using it should know better than to expose with a histogram that is almost entirely in the lower 10%. That should somehow clue it in that it is making a mistake. That is something you might expect with center point metering, but not with matrix.

It depends. A photo of the night sky or a cityscape could easily have a histogram piled up in the left and that would be absolutely correct.

There is no way that any camera or computer can give the "correct" exposure because it doesn't know what you want to show. The problem is that the camera is trying to guess, and often gets it wrong. But what's worse than that is that it is unpredictable.

My Sony a850 had a much simpler system. No 91,000 point colour-based metering system.. just a simple evaluative meter that would average the whole viewfinder image. But it was highly predictable. My D800 does a decent job, but it's wrong a lot of the time.